For months senior White House and Pentagon advisers have portrayed Krekar and his group as the missing link between Saddam and bin Laden. The joint Iraqi-Al Qaeda sponsorship of Ansar was supposed to be a major reason for Saddam’s inclusion as a target in the war on terror. In some respects Saddam and bin Laden could hardly find a more congenial mutual ally. Rival Kurds have described Krekar as a “mentally unstable megalomaniac with a voracious appetite for blood.” Three months before 9-11, he applauded bin Laden as the “jewel in the crown of the Muslim nation.” But so far there is no solid evidence that Krekar’s 400 or so fighters received help either from Saddam or from bin Laden.
Bush officials cheered when Dutch authorities took Krekar into custody last September, acting on a tip from the Iranian government. The Iranians had expelled him and he was on his way to Norway, where his family resides. U.S. officials urged the Dutch to keep him in jail while the Jordanian government filed a formal request for his extradition on drug charges. Two convicted traffickers had identified him as an alleged heroin smuggler. (“The only truth in [their story] was that I have black hair,” says Krekar.)
FBI officers visited him twice during his imprisonment, for a total of four hours. The Justice Department had sent the Dutch a secret document saying Krekar was under U.S. investigation for “providing material support to terrorism” and possible “connections to the Al Qaeda organization.” According to Krekar’s Dutch lawyer, Victor Koppe, the agents seemed poorly prepared at the first meeting, and the second was mostly frittered away on legal quibbles. After that, a Dutch government source says, the Americans appeared to lose interest in the prisoner. There was little or no further contact.
Although an extradition hearing was scheduled for late January, the Jordanians never produced hard proof of their drug charges. The case was flimsy, Dutch intelligence sources say, and their own country’s intelligence service was unable to substantiate a connection between Krekar and Saddam Hussein. “We don’t believe he is as big a fish as some people thought,” says one Dutch official. Last week Krekar was deported to Norway, where Dutch and U.S. authorities expected him to be arrested. Oslo is investigating him for allegedly fomenting terrorist activities. Instead, Norwegian prosecutors released him.
U.S. officials continue to insist that Ansar has a special place in the terror world. The group has been accused of giving refuge to Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan and of experimenting with chemical and biological weapons, possibly with Iraqi government help. Another leader of the group, Krekar’s old friend Abu Wael, is said to be a senior officer of Saddam’s secret police. Krekar says the stories are all lies extracted from captured Ansar fighters under torture by rival Kurds. He describes Abu Wael as a toothless diabetic, too old and feeble to threaten anyone.
But American officials keep dropping new allegations, claiming even wider conspiracies. A U.S. official traveling with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suggested last week that Ansar has ties to a group of Algerians arrested in London with traces of the powerful poison ricin. “We don’t think people like this ought to be running around,” says another U.S. official. All the same, the Bush administration doesn’t seem able to do anything about it. It’s one thing to say Saddam and bin Laden are behind Ansar. It’s another thing to prove it.
